Reaction: All the low UIDs suddenly start talking about how this is absolutely true, and how they couldn't get into Google or whatever because their recruiter thought they were too old. This one, this is the prejudice that truly exists in the tech industry, and they know because they've experienced it.

Typing this comment out on an older Llano laptop, the APU inside is an A6-3400M with 4 CPU "cores" and 1 GPU core. There was never a correlation between core numbers and A[X]. It's just a way to segment by performance.

You've been to Fiji and seen the "i cula ni bokola" forks I take it. Well modern natives being hardline Christian, they're taught an exaggerated take on the brutality of their cannibal past in order to underscore how good they live now with their Christian faith. Cannibalism in Polynesia was ritualistic, done mainly after war or in the process of a ritual of high importance. You don't build an agrarian trader society (which the Polynesians were) if everyone's eating everybody they don't know.

>I take it you've never heard of Margaret Hamilton or Admiral Grace Hopper who somehow managed to excel in a much more sexist society than we have now because instead of whining about the patriarchy on Twitter or Jezebel, they went and proved themselves better than their male peers.
What if a girl entering into STM was only just as good as her male peers? Why does a minority have to out-perform to reach the same results? Don't you think that's unfair, and still biased?

Your complete ignorance of history, especially the history of white supremacy, is laughable. Black people weren't allowed to use the same seats, toilets, pools and rooms as black people. Does that strike you as a time when white people had a positive view of black people?

Ellen is a person who brazenly attempted to abuse the gender inequality debate in a high profile court case to make millions of dollars when she was fired for being abrasive, lazy and generally incompetent.

Actually, it's not at all brazen. The facts of the case painted the firm as pretty sexist. What they could not prove to a reasonable standard was that this background sexism was directly responsible for her not getting promotions and bonuses. Her husband's legal problems also complicate the narrative, and cast doubt on her intentions

This is why the civil rights movement in the 60s waited for Rosa Parks, even though there had been several incidents of black women being mistreated on buses prior to Ms Parks' case. People are simple-minded, and confounding factors (like illegitimate children, alcohol/drug addictions, unsympathetic looks when it came to these many black women who went through what Rosa Parks went through) make your cause less likely to be successful, as unfair as that is.

It takes a shitload more than $20 million to make a AAA sci-fi or fantasy movie. A $20 million dollar movie that relies on special effects to keep suspension of disbelief would look pretty shit, even if bloody Meryl Streep and Colin Firth were the two mains. My point with the pyramids is exactly this, we have become accustomed to a certain level of fit and finish in the media we consume. While a lot of money that goes into the media industry might be "squandered" in the opinion of slashdot geeks, but a lot is still spent on stuff that needs buying or people that need hiring in order to keep the quality up. Like I said, I'm talking strictly about Sci Fi and Fantasy movies, which have a requirement for special effects, both on computers and in the real world, and often film in lots of diverse locations. You can't do that with a $20 million budget and still have a product that looks amazing at the premiere.
You're right that the little guys won't derive much benefits from the crowdsourcing model, and that's my objection to the anti-copyright people. So you say the current system is flawed (true enough), and you want to replace it? Fine. What are you going to replace it with? A completely new system that might not even work for the media format in question? Suuuuure.

Nobody builds pyramids to house the bodies of dead monarchs anymore, but thousands of people flock to Egypt every year to see the old ones. I don't know about you, but I quite like big budget science fiction, fantasy and action movies. The stories are a bit dumb, but I have no doubt that without the million dollar budgets, the effects that these movies rely on to function would not be possible. Cutting out copy protection would hurt these movies the most, and I've seen indie attempts at making science fiction and fantasy movies. The writing is normally better, but the effects are almost hilariously bad, and the actors are pretty iffy as well.

Why would I want a laptop with a screen smaller than 10 or 11 inches? That sounds useless. I would use a tablet that small, which is what Microsoft seems to be targeting with that rule, but a laptop? No thank you. Besides, even with zero-cost Windows, making a medium-sized tablet or tiny laptop with good internals for less than $99 is going to be a tough proposition, especially with low-end Androids flooding the market.

Google's been making some noise about improving the offline capabilities of ChromeOS, and letting approved Android apps into the ChromeOS store. If these things happen in a reasonably quick period, then that's a pocket Linux lappy I would use.

More seriously, because Apple has nothing to little to gain from copylefting Xcode, and a lot more to lose. It makes more sense to focus on an GCC alternative than to trust the GNU team to not put even more roadblocks in place to prevent GCC integration into Xcode. I can't believe you made me defend Apple.

Keep in mind that hundreds of millions of years of extinctions and adaptive radiations have taken place between then and now. It's not only a question of whether insects can exist at the larger sizes they once grew to, but also whether they'd be competitive enough to take back their former ecological niches from the current incumbents. To use a tech analogy, it's like asking whether a flip phone can dominate the premium phone market in 2014, because they once dominated it in 2005.

Judging from the range and distribution of insects alive in the present, it seems that for most insects, small size and rapid reproduction are the way to go for them. Their body plan, with it's less efficient circulatory system, and less complex brains, seem to put them at a disadvantage if they began to grow larger. Remember that there are a vast array of mammals and birds that specialize specifically in preying on insects.